"Woe To You": Avoiding The Pharisees’ Mistakes About Faith Series

WRONG WAY: Jesus rejected the Pharisees’ approach to faith.

- Luke 11:37-38.

- Jesus gets invited to dine with a Pharisee and He goes. That in itself is interesting: Jesus is engaging with those who are His most vociferous enemies.

- Why did He do that? I think there are at least a couple reasons.

- First, there are some of the Pharisees who end up believing in Him. Not all of them reject Him out of hand.

- Second, I think, as this passage illustrates, He wanted to make it clear to His disciples and to the Pharisees that He stood in sharp opposition to what the current religious authorities were teaching. Jesus didn’t come to mildly tweak the prevailing religious approach. No, this is new wine in new wineskins. These confrontations are unpleasant but at one level necessary. And it also furthers the timeline that will lead to His arrest and crucifixion.

- Jesus is bold in His pronouncements here.

- He uses “woe” over and over again. This is no mild suggestion. He is rebuking them. He is pointing out how far short they’ve fallen.

- Sometimes you get so used to how things are that you have no vision for how they should be. Or should have been all along. The Pharisees have established their way of doing faith and they think they are God’s defenders. Everyone else is messing up but they are the ones who are actually standing up for Him. Jesus obviously deeply disagrees. And He’s going to let them know exactly where they are off.

WHAT JESUS WANTS OUR FAITH TO LOOK LIKE:

- There are several ways to share the points that Jesus makes here. He obviously points out where they are off-track by iterating the “woes.”

- I want to take those points and approach them from the perspective of what Jesus is pointing people toward. That is, what Jesus wants our faith to look like.

- So I’m going to share the way Jesus wants our faith to be. Of course, I’ll unpack the negative point that Jesus is making, but I want to focus the larger points tonight on what He wants us to look like.

- Within that exploration, it’s a good moment for each of us to ponder whether our faith as we are presently living it out looks more like Jesus’ vision or the Pharisees’ practice.

1. Genuine inner change.

- Luke 11:39-41, 44.

- The Pharisee who invited Jesus to dinner is bothered that Jesus did not do the ceremonial washing before the meal. Let’s be clear: this is not a hygiene issue but a religious ritual issue.

- Jesus uses this as a jumping off point for the criticisms that He wants to level toward Pharisaism. The host was concerned about proper washing of the hands. Jesus turns that point into the proper washing of the heart.

- In v. 39 Jesus talks about the meticulous attention that the Pharisees gave to the washing of the cup and dish. They were very concerned about ceremonial cleanness. They had a host of rules to make sure they were able to maintain that outward cleanness.

- Jesus is unimpressed.

- Why? He transitions from that ceremonial cleanness to heart dirtiness. Inside the Pharisees’ hearts was “greed and wickedness.” They were so focused on the outward things that they missed the inner things.

Jesus slams the point home in v. 40 that the inside needs to be something they pay attention to as well.

- Verse 41 is a little challenging. I think the point He is making is that a genuinely changed heart will be concerned about the least of these and will overflow in the direction of the poor.

- I’m going to include v. 44 in this point because it makes an adjacent point.

- What’s the point about unmarked graves? If you are standing on an unmarked grave, it’s something that likely looks good outwardly (nice grass!) but is dead inside (rotted bones just beneath your feet). It would be like a Pharisee religious leader looking respectable in his flowing robes while his heart was rotten and dead toward God.

- The point Jesus is getting at is that outward conformity is not what He wants. He is not interested in masking evil in hearts. He is not interested in covering up wickedness. He is not playing for good P.R.

- He wants genuine inner change. He wants people’s hearts to be different and genuinely loving God. He wants people to actually be good in the divine sense.

- How does He intend to do this? Well, we know the larger story because we’ve read the rest of the New Testament. The short version is that we acknowledge our sinfulness, believe in what Jesus accomplished in His death and resurrection, receive the new spiritual heart and becoming a new creation, and then walk forward in the Holy Spirit. You’ve heard me preach this numerous times. Jesus’ salvation is effective for transforming us into beings who can actually live for God. He has opened the door to a way of living out our spiritual lives that will actually make us like Christ. Will we be perfect? No. Will we be genuinely and deeply changed? Yes. Will we be able to live in a way that brings much glory to God? Yes. Will we have transformed hearts? Yes.